Our Trans and Queer Communities, near and far, are experiencing renewed and increasing attacks against our bodies, our ways of gathering, and our expressions. The intensifying assaults make our lives more precarious, which in turn makes our homes more unstable. We are seeing Trans and Queer siblings getting priced out of housing and healthcare, struggling to put food in their bellies. When our siblings do end up unhoused, they are violently targeted by aggressive law enforcement enacting regressive anti-vagrancy laws. Our Trans and Queer Existence is being legislated away, and we are the ones at the forefront of this struggle. Again. And…

We, Trans and Queer Peoples, are still here. We, Trans and Queer Peoples, have always been here. We, Trans and Queer Peoples, will always be here. We are nothing new, and our continued and sustained existence will forever hold firm against any and all forms of repression, tyranny, and oppression. And…

We, Trans and Queer Peoples, must find each other and organize. It is not enough to merely exist. We demand a future where ALL our Trans and Queer Peoples are thriving, where we ALL live in dignity with ALL our essential needs freely met. To realize this future means cultivating opportunities HERE & NOW for its possible existence.  

MORE THAN MERE EXISTENCE is an exhibition and catalog that strives to unite three aspects of everyday life that are under renewed attack: safe and secure housing, Trans and Queer existence, and artistic expression. Subject to exclusion, precarity, and censorship, it is incumbent upon us to cultivate spaces of defiance. 

MORE THAN MERE EXISTENCE platforms the conversations and complexities of Trans and Queer communities who are doing the embodied work towards decommodifying and decolonizing our relationship to land, without seeking to essentialize our identities to solely that work, knowing that we are “creators” in many senses. 

The MORE THAN MERE EXISTENCE call for art, exhibition, and catalog is defined by accessibility — not prescribing to specific disciplines or forms. Following the lineage of the “Nothing New” Anti-Curatorial Origins (see more at end of catalog), Trans and Queer artists in the fight for housing/land use/ spatial justice submitted pieces of art that they have already created with no thematic barrier.

It is in this vision of a future of thriving Trans and Queer Peoples that we—an autonomous collective of Trans and Queer Housing/Land Use/Spatial Justice Organizers, Activists, and Artists—are facilitating MORE THAN MERE EXISTENCE for the Third Annual Queer Housing Summit on August 23, 2025.

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